Comfort food for your heart
5
By Dacian Falx
It's an odd thing, really. In 1997, when I first got ahold of this album I was just breaking up with my girlfriend. I opened the case and slipped this CD into my Discman®. I was walking through a sheeting rainstorm, a hard, cold, upstate NY rainstorm in early March. I was crying, I was cold, I didn't really care. At track 4, the White Spirit, I stopped moving... I stood rooted to the ground, tears running down my face and rain pouring off the brim of my hat and over my oilskin coat. I was lost in the simple beauty of the music, unbidden a smile forced it's way to my mouth, and I started to walk again, leaving all my problems and worries at the spot I'd stopped.
A few years later, out of high school, I wandered off onto the road, in search of my life. Pursuing a dream through working renaissance faires... there were weeks of sub-human living conditions, freezing cold nights and canned green beans at every meal for weeks, simple poverty. Yet, whenever all seemed lost I slipped this, my one luxury, this album out. I'd sit huddled in my blankets, the wind howling by, not a friend for a thousand miles and listen to track 8, Southern Jukebox Music, over and over. I'd listen to all of this album, and I'd begin to smile. My parents divorce, the death of my grandfather, my own failures and the cold, bitter days of January in the mountains are no longer enough to crush me. Not when I have music as my armour, my shield and my sword.
Even now, when friends part, or love fades, I need only to play this album and all my troubles melt away.
Windham Hill has made my life better for the music they bring.
Life can't touch you when your days have music like this in them.
